On the subject of hotels if any of you are lucky enough to have tons of points/status with hotel chains, or a relative or friend who is willing to give/sell you some, you can use those to either offset some of the massive cost or get access to rooms reserved for club members.

My friends Dad was able to offer us sufficient points to get a shared room downtown Montreal, pretty lucky! Proximity to the track is really the issue.

Got tickets for me + mate at GS33… Can’t wait to see Vettel bereft at that corner again }:D

Was planning on getting the Bronze trio seat package but I’m surprised to see they already sold out, even in early january… Does anyone know how many tickets of that type were available, when they sold out, or if there is a staggered availability strategy for those? Even for 2014 it sounds pretty exciting.

Note: almost all my pics were taken with a Canon series 18-55mm kit lens with polariser. My friend who I went with actually bought a dslr for the event and Im sure he wasnt the only one there as a novice photter. Shows that with a little patience some surprisingly good shots can be obtained with only a modest amount of kit.

1. Hamilton – Almost faultless all year. Only some hesitancy in australia and poor setups in belgium and japan as drops in form.
2. Vettel – Faced by far the toughest of all his 3 championship contentions but rose to the challenge, and cleaned up when he needed to. A couple of scrappy races here and there but spa, abu dhabi and brazil showed he isn’t afraid to get dirty fighting back from disadvantage. Gained some battle scars proving that he really had to fight for this title.
3. Alonso – Whilst he did extract the maximum from the car and then some, he also made a couple of critical errors eg. Japan (and so very, very nearly off the line in singapore) and curiously lost his edge in the last few races of the season, when Massa was genuinely faster than him or he was otherwise lacklustre. Vettel shades him fractionally as I wonder if the pressure started to get to fernando later on.
4. Kimi – A class act all year. Absolutely at home in the no-pressure, relaxed atmosphere of the team. Had he driven a faster car, he would have achieved a schumi-2002 style sweep. That said, for much of the season he was overly conservative and I cant help but feel a desperate hamilton or vettel would have dragged the lotus that bit further up the points. Winning in bahrain was definitely possible.

The whole USGP weekend:
– The monumental enthusiasm of both organisers and fans was a serious feelgood factor, there was not a sour note all 3 days. The setup was absolutely 1st class all the way.
– A classic, straight fight between the two fastest drivers of the current generation in just about equally matched machinery, reminiscent of Hakkinen-Schumi, utterly crushing the rest of the field.
– Clean, feisty battles all the way up and down the field with barely a shred of carbon fibre to be seen anywhere
– Kept the championship alive to lay up the perfect showdown in brazil!
(- and finally a HAM-VET-ALO podium)